Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Every country has the government it deserves.